Browse Items (8 total)

Have you heard the story of the young legislator who was the hero of Tennessee’s ratification of the 19th Amendment? I’m not talking about Harry Burn. Harry Burn has gotten way more ink than he’s due. He was a young member of the Tenn. Assembly who…

When exactly is the 19th Amendment anniversary? Was it ratified on August 18 or August 26? What’s the difference? Which should we observe?  Read on for answers. The 19th Amendment cleared Congress in June 1919, 41 years after it was introduced. This…

Remember Elizabeth Meriwether, the suffragist who helped start the Memphis chapter of the Ku Klux Klan? She shared her home with her brother- & sister-in-law, Lide Smith Meriwether. Lide was as devoted a suffragist as Elizabeth, and more…

Within weeks of the murders, so much of Black Memphis had left town that the streetcar ridership collapsed. Men from the City Railway Co came to Ida B Wells' office, seeking to understand why Black riders had disappeared. Quotes from IBW's book…

By 1892, Ida B Wells’ Memphis paper was thriving. She traveled the Mississippi Delta selling subscriptions, tripling circulation. Free Speech was editorially fearless: Ida sharply called out any accommodation of white supremacy, even by Black…

Ida B Wells didn’t love being a teacher, but as she built an adult life in Memphis, she began working as a reporter. Realizing that owning & editing her own paper was the only way to make a living as a journalist, Wells invested in The Memphis…

Way down the rabbit hole tonight. Memphis cartes de visites circa 1880s, many from a Gebhardt Studios on Beale Street that had both black & white patrons. A whole cache on Flickr, lovingly annotated circa 2015 by someone I can't identify in real…

Memphis was rebuilding when Ida B. Wells arrived in the 1880s. After the yellow fever epidemic, the city levied a tax to build drainage systems & fight mosquitoes. The city fathers were white, but a growing Black population garnered some power:…